The Eroded Self

By Jeffrey Rosen

Published: April 30, 2000

Monica Lewinsky is a most unlikely spokesperson for the virtues of reticence. But in addition to selling designer handbags, she has emerged after her internship as an advocate of privacy in cyberspace. ''People need to realize that your e-mails can be read and made public, and that you need to be cautious,'' she warned recently on ''Larry King Live.'' Lewinsky was unsettled by Kenneth Starr's decision to subpoena Washington bookstores for receipts of her purchases; in her underappreciated biography, ''Monica's Story,'' she points to the bookstore subpoenas as one of the most invasive moments in the Starr investigation. But she was also distraught when the prosecutors subpoenaed her home computer. From the recesses of her hard drive, they retrieved e-mail messages that she had tried unsuccessfully to delete, along with the love letters she had drafted -- but never sent -- to the president. ''It was such a violation,'' Lewinsky complained to her biographer, Andrew Morton.

Many Americans are beginning to understand just how she felt. As reading and writing, health care and shopping and sex and gossip increasingly take place in cyberspace, it is suddenly dawning on us that the most intimate details of our daily lives are being monitored, searched, recorded and stored as meticulously as Monica Lewinsky's were. For most citizens, however, the greatest threat to privacy comes not from special prosecutors but from employers and from all-seeing Web sites and advertising networks that track every move we make in cyberspace.

Consider the case of DoubleClick Inc. For the past few years, DoubleClick, the Internet's largest advertising company, has been compiling detailed information on the browsing habits of millions of Web users by placing ''cookie'' files on our hard drives. Cookies are electronic footprints that allow Web sites and advertising networks to monitor our online movements with telescopic precision -- including the search terms we enter as well as the articles we skim and how long we spend skimming them. Once DoubleClick sends you a cookie, you will receive targeted ads when you visit the Web sites of its 2,500 clients. So, for example, if you visit Alta Vista's auto section you may be greeted by a cheerful ad from G.M. or Ford.

As long as users were confident that their virtual identities weren't being linked to their actual identities, many were happy to accept DoubleClick cookies in exchange for the convenience of navigating the Web more efficiently. Then last November, DoubleClick bought Abacus Direct, a database of names, addresses and information about off-line buying habits of 90 million households, compiled from the largest direct mail catalogs and retailers in the nation. In January, DoubleClick began compiling profiles linking individuals' actual names and addresses to Abacus's detailed records of their online and off-line purchases. Suddenly, shopping that once seemed anonymous was being archived in personally identifiable dossiers.

Under pressure from privacy advocates and from dot-com investors, DoubleClick announced in March that it would postpone its profiling scheme until the federal government and the e-commerce industry agree on privacy standards. Still, the DoubleClick controversy points to the inherent threat to privacy in a new economy that is based, in unprecedented ways, on the recording and exchange of intimate personal information. Privacy protects us from being misdefined and judged out of context. This protection is especially important in a world of short attention spans, a world in which information can easily be confused with knowledge. When intimate personal information circulates among a small group of people who know you well, its significance can be weighed against other aspects of your personality and character. (Monica Lewinsky didn't mind that her friends knew she had given the president a copy of Nicholson Baker's ''Vox'' because her friends knew that she was much more than a person who would read a book about phone sex.) But when your browsing habits -- or e-mail messages -- are exposed to strangers, you may be reduced, in their eyes, to nothing more than the most salacious book you once read or the most vulgar joke you once told. And even if your Internet browsing isn't in any way embarrassing, you run the risk of being stereotyped as the kind of person who would read a particular book or listen to a particular song. Your public identity may be distorted by fragments of information that have little to do with how you define yourself. In a world where citizens are bombarded with information, people form impressions quickly, based on sound bites, and these brief impressions tend to oversimplify and misrepresent our complicated and often contradictory characters.

The sociologist Georg Simmel observed nearly 100 years ago that people are often more comfortable confiding in strangers than in friends, colleagues or neighbors. Confessions to strangers are cost-free because strangers move on; you never expect to see them again, so you are not inhibited by embarrassment or shame. In many ways the Internet is a technological manifestation of the phenomenon of the stranger. There's no reason to fear the disclosure of intimate information to faceless Web sites as long as those Web sites have no motive or ability to collate the data into a personally identifiable profile that could be disclosed to anyone you actually know. By contrast, the prospect that your real identity might be linked to permanent databases of your online -- and off-line -- behavior is chilling, because the databases could be bought, subpoenaed or traded by employers, insurance companies, ex-spouses and others who have the ability to affect your life in profound ways.

Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at the George Washington University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. This article is adapted from his book, ''The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America.'' to be published next month by Random House.